Do you own your IP?

Fans of Taylor Swift would have noted that the pop/country superstar has recently dropped a re-recorded “Love Story” (aptly re-titled "Love Story (Taylor's Version)") as the lead single from Fearless (Taylor's Version), the re-recording of her 2008 studio album.

This new development follows the long-running Taylor Swift-Scooter Braun drama when Braun’s company Ithaca Holdings sold off the hot potato being Swift’s master recordings of her first 6 albums in November 2020. For quite a while now, the singer-songwriter has been trying to buy back her master recordings, but to no success. Learning that her nemesis would profit from any future sale of her master recordings, it appears that Swift has made the hard decision to not pursue the matter further and instead, go ahead with the re-recording of her older works.

For the uninitiated, master recordings are the original copies from which physical/digital copies are duplicated and sold/streamed. While regular folks may simply assume that the artistes own the master recordings of their songs in addition to their 12-bathroom mansions and pink Maseratis, in reality, these master recordings are usually owned by the record labels who manage the artistes.

When signing on new and upcoming talent, record labels usually require that artistes assign the master recordings of their work to them in exchange for making them colossal musical cash cows. Usually, the record labels own the master recordings until the copyright duration expires, but for a while now, artistes have pushed for a shorter duration before these rights return to them, or not assigning the rights to the record labels at all for a smaller amount of royalties.

If songwriters don’t necessarily own the songs which they have composed, this leads us to question a fact most of us would assume has straightforward answers: Do you own the rights to your intellectual creations? Let us have a brief look at IP ownership in Malaysia.

Copyright

For most artistic works such as books, songs, and videos, the rights to these works are generally owned by the author, unless the work was commissioned by another person. Then it’s owned by the person who commissioned the work.

For example, if one were to pay a struggling artist a bag of peanuts and ‘exposure’ in exchange for an artwork painted using the artist’s lifeblood, the rights to the painting will belong to the client. The client will be free to display the painting in his house, charge people to see his painting, or place it under the hammer in a Sotheby’s auction. The artist, in this case, only gets a limited amount of rights, such as the right to be named as the artist who painted the painting, and the right to prevent others from defacing his/her painting.

Of course, like in the earlier musician-record label example, if there is a contract in place between the author and employer or person who commissioned the work, then the terms of the contract will take precedence. So if the contract states that the author retains all ownership rights to the work, then the rights will remain with the author.

Patents

If you have invented a new force field face shield that allows people to go maskless but not spread the Covid bug around, you, as the inventor, own the rights to your invention, unless your were employed/commissioned to perform inventive work for an employer/client. In this case whatever invention which was made during the course of your employment will belong to the employer. Should you wish to keep the rights to your invention, there must be an agreement in place between you and your employer/client that says so.

Now, if you are a student undergoing a post-graduate course in a university, you may have signed an agreement to assign all intellectual property rights arising from your research work to the university. This is because the university is not your employer (you’re paying them, in fact!) so under Malaysian patent law, the rights would have resided with you if you did not assign them to the university.

Industrial designs

In the same manner, a designer owns the rights to the designs which (s)he created, unless the designer was engaged by an employer/client to perform design work. Again, only if there is an agreement in place stating that the designer retains his/her rights to the design work would the rights remain with the designer. Otherwise, they would be deemed to belong to the employer or person who commissioned the design.

So in general, the rights to a work will belong to its creator, but if the creator was employed/commissioned by another to create that work, then that work belongs to the one who employed/commissioned the creator. Of course, specific circumstances will change who owns the work, so it’s best to consult an IP professional to be sure.

Not sure if you own the rights to your intellectual creations? Why not drop us a holler? After all, we’re here to help.

AI = Artificial Inventors?

The fear of artificial intelligences (AIs) is a rational thing, as ludicrous as it may sound. Not only do AIs steal jobs and threaten to take over the world and enslave humanity, also wreck human relationships by ‘autocorrecting’ perfectly innocent text messages prior to them being sent out. But fear not, human inventors. AIs are incapable of being designated as inventors in a patent application. So your jobs are safe. For now!

DABUS is an AI with inventive capability created by Dr Stephen Thaler, an indisputable creative genius and possible patriarch of the new AI world order. By virtue of its two artificial neural networks, DABUS is able to devise an inventive solution to a problem posed to it. At present, DABUS has managed to invent a special signal light that is capable of drawing attention to it better than a regular signal light, and a fractal-shaped food container that is easier to grip and heat up. Clever… for a machine.

Under the notion that it is improper for humans to get credit for something fully accomplished by AI, Dr Thaler, with the aid of an international team of patent attorneys, has applied for patents for these inventions in various countries around the world, naming himself as the applicant and DABUS as the inventor. However, the quest for getting a patent for these AI inventions has been blocked by proverbial firewalls in the US, UK and at the European Patent Office (EPO) as applications in these countries were unable to proceed due to particular technicality concerning the status of the inventor.

As it turned out, inventors need to be actual human beings, be it created the good ol’ fashioned way or in a human battery farm. So DABUS, an AI, cannot be considered an inventor under present patent laws. While it has been argued that the laws do not explicitly state that an inventor must be a person, the respective patent offices have reasoned that the correct interpretation of the laws is that an inventor is intended to be a real human being.

Presently, the decisions to refuse a patent have been appealed against in the aforementioned jurisdictions. While many patent offices have engaged stakeholders and the general public on the subject of AI inventions, AI inventorship is not one that has been fully thrashed out. Whether Dr Thaler will successfully get IP offices to recognise DABUS as an inventor remains to be seen. Who knows, we may soon witness a scene where an AI housed in a mechanical body in the likeness of the late Robin Williams stands before a panel of judges, demanding to be recognised not only as an inventor but a legal person with all associated rights.

Did you, and not an AI, invent a new technology or make an improvement to an existing one? Not sure how to go about protecting it? Why not drop us a holler? After all, we’re here to help. But first, please complete the CAPTCHA challenge...

In Search of Silver Linings

"We know 2020 will bring with it more challenges but we are adamant that we will be part of the solution and not part of the problem. After all, we are here to help..." That's the last sentence of my end of the year message for 2019. This is probably one of those times when I hate to be right about something!

Like most of you, 2020 hasn't been a bed of roses for us. But it didn't seem that way in the beginning. It was to be the year of our expansion. The road ahead looked brilliant in the first month of the year. Well, yes there were some dark clouds in the horizon. The Aussie bush fires, the Influenza A outbreak, and maybe that little pneumonia thingy in Wuhan...but everything seemed to be coming together swimmingly. Boy were we wrong! Because in the following months, 2020 descended into an orgy of catastrophes taken straight from Lovecraft's wet dreams. Our plans for INTA 2020 were completely scuppered, during the lockdown hardly any work came in, we've been living/working in isolation for the past couple of months, and receivables are at an all time high as many clients struggled to stay afloat.

And now, as the annus horribilis draws to a close, we really hope we can finally flush 2020 down the toilet, maybe together with some of our hard-fought toilet paper. However, looking back, now with a little benefit of hindsight, 2020 hasn't been all bad. In fact, if we can look past the cacophony of doom and gloom, there are actually plenty of silver linings to be found. Instead of meeting at INTA, we had virtual meetings with many of our associates. And instead of talking about our business, clients or the IP Office, we spoke about our families, our home, our worries, the recipes we've tried and the redundancy of trousers in a Zoom meeting. During the months where work wasn't coming in, we were able to shift our attention to fundraising and managing the delivery of weekly humanitarian aids to the refugee communities in KL who've lost their livelihood during the lockdown. At its peak we were able to deliver food and other necessities to almost 600 individuals every week, and we couldn't have done it without the help of our clients, associates and partners who've so graciously given their time, money and effort. We've also provided discounts and relaxed our credit terms for clients who were facing financial difficulties and we're thankful that most of them have survived and are on the road to recovery.

Looking around, we find the same pattern cropping up everywhere. Whenever catastrophes hit, we see people rising to the occasion, coming and working together altruistically. In fact, most often our actions are what make the silver linings possible.

All in all 2020 has been a timely reminder of why we started Gordian. Next year, we will continue to increase the social impact of our company. Aside from working with the Chin refugee community under our Lametna Project, we will be working with St Nicholas' Home Penang on a project to provide entrepreneurial training to their trainees who are blind or visually impaired. We will also continue to assist local start-ups through our Start-up Assistance.

And finally, we know that 2021 may bring with it more challenges but we are adamant that we will continue to be part of the solution and not part of the problem. After all, we are here to help! Let's hope I'm wrong (at least about the challenges) this time round.

Happy 2021 everyone!